A highlight of this year’s Red Bull Sound Select 30 Days in LA November concert series, the ascendant Car Seat Headrest rocked a packed Teragram Ballroom Sunday night, their first area show since April.

Their origin story as a bedroom-recording Bandcamp wunderkind has been well documented, though Car Seat Headrest live is very much a proper four-piece band these days – Ethan Ives, searing lefty lead guitar; Andrew Katz bashing the kit, Seth Dalby holding down the low end – and of course, singer-songwriter Will Toledo, on rhythm guitar and vocals. He has a classic throaty delivery that’s more earnest than ironic, that, along with the big guitar sounds, tap right into nostalgia pleasure centers for older indie rock vets, a few of whom are in the room tonight. While at the same time it’s clearly bringing in youngins brand new to indie, forged all the more by his online presence. Toledo’s fast easing into the role of star band frontperson, sporting a smart blazer and skinny tie, cutting a shape something like a vintage anime hero, all big hair and slim limbs.

It’s unfair, really, to be so talented–a producer, DJ, songwriter, singer, good looking, at all of twenty-six, and if that weren’t enough, he can pick up a saxophone when need be. This is Nicolas Jaar, of course–NYC born Chilean musical artist–and about the best thing going in electronic/experimental music today. This is the second of two sold out nights at the Fonda Theater, the LA stop of a month long national tour in support of his excellent new full-length release, Sirens. That’s “release” in the fuller sense of the word, as in let into the world, not the archaic music business term. His records just seem to appear, little advance hype, just a brief note the man himself, essentially saying “come and get it,” and it’s available digitally at no cost initially. (His Other People label sells high quality digital and a select physical vinyl pressings, including Sirens, the deluxe version of which has a “scratch off” cover, the album art completely covered in lottery ticket film. It helpfully includes a quarter for scratching.)

Tycho, the ambient/rock instrumental brainchild of Scott Hansen, played the first of a pair of “pop-up” (e.g., short notice) shows at the Fonda Theatre Thursday evening. The Tycho crowd, sold out here tonight, leans young and diverse, no doubt accruing fans from his EDM association, while not strictly slotting into that genre. Performing as a four-piece – Hansen, synths & guitars; Rory O’Connor, drums; Zac Brown, bass & guitar; Billy Kim, bass & synths—with a sparse stage setup, the show marked the occasion of the surprise drop of Epoch, his fourth full length album a week prior. Pop-up shows and surprise album drops, of course signs of the times in an industry where novelty is not only welcome but increasingly necessary to stand apart in the crowded marketplace.

All due respect to Bloc Party/Bob Mould/Ezra Furman who played the actual final show on Sunday, but Sigur Rós brought the Hollywood Bowl’s 2016 season to its crescendo on a warm night this past Saturday, a vindicating sell-out show at the venue they played to a not quite half-full audience a decade prior in 2006.

Performing now as a three-piece – Jonsí Bergisson (vocals/guitar/more), Goggí Holm (bass/more), Orrí Dýrason (drums/keyboards/more) – following the departure of longtime member and primary keyboardist, Kjarri Sveinsson, the Icelandic band carried the whole of the show alone, a marked change from past tours that have included augmentation by several additional backing players on strings and other instrumentation. Clearly there’s a statement of independence and self-reliance about this, with no new album to support, this is a presentation of the band itself, that three of them can and will carry on, even filling a Hollywood Bowl with sound without assistance (admittedly there are samples triggered at times). In fact, their new key photo art is of three of them, face on (if a bit marred with a “melting” effect), in one of the most direct looks we’ve had of the band members in their official imagery, lifting just a bit of the mystery in their aesthetic. That said, once this tour concludes, the three-piece Sigur Rós firmly established, they return to Los Angeles in April 2017 for a series of shows at Walt Disney Hall backed by the LA Phil.

A typically solid, if perhaps not as transcendent as usual and a bit restrained at times, performance by the band divided into two parts with a brief intermission in between, they showcased their signature sound that weaves experimental, “post-rock” (ugh, I know…), ambient and modern classical, going from quiet and intimate sparseness to swelling to the bracingly loud and epic density. Or, rather, should be bracingly loud; on the technical side, the Bowl did not serve their sound as well as might have been hoped. Their dynamics would seem well suited to be amplified the venue (my own fuzzy recollections of that 2005 show are positive – though I may have been too close to the stage to be objective) but the volume Saturday was simply too low; Jonsí’s bowed electric guitar never quite reaching those volcanic sonic peaks, the occasional toy piano plonking lost in the sea of glass clanking and chomping picnickers. All told, it did not necessarily make for the immersive audio/visual experience that Sigur Rós is known for.

Radiohead brought down the curtain in grand fashion on their California jaunt of their brief A Moon Shaped Pool tour–a headlining set up north at Outside Lands festival, bracketed by a pair of relatively intimate shows here at the Shrine Auditorium, the second of which took place this past Monday evening.

The beloved iconic English act have always had a special relationship with L.A., dating back to their early days on Capitol Records, going on to record music here, play epic Hollywood Bowl shows (and one famous tiny charity concert), frontman Thom Yorke basing his Atoms for Peace project here and occasionally spotted at one of the hipper electronic music nights around town. Add to this the fact that tickets to the shows for this modest sized venue (capacity just over 6,000, compared to about three times that for the NYC shows at MSG two weeks ago) were incredibly difficult to come by, the jammed on-sale back in March causing a minor ripple of outrage across online channels (Yorke himself expressing frustration at the time) and it was all but expected that the band would bring a little something extra to the this pair of shows.